Kill All the Lawyers

Lawyers are not real popular, largely because they’re known to be sharp and sleazy. They often excuse themselves by saying that the problem is the client, whom they are duty-bound zealously to represent regardless of how unappetizing he may be. There’s something to that, but it’s oversold. First, the canons of ethics that “bind” lawyers are written by the lawyers themselves, and have lots of exceptions when the lawyers’ own interests are at stake. For example, the lawyer’s duty to keep a client’s confidences disappears when — you’d never guess it — there’s a fee dispute! Second, many lawyers don’t have to accept as a client any random person who shows up at the door. When you’re a public defender, for example, you have a real good idea who’ll be showing up at the door, namely, someone who’s been up to no good and wants you to see if you can sell some shake-and-jive story to the judge (or, more often, shake the Excuse Tree to see what falls off).

Still, at its best, the legal profession can serve a noble end. One of the things that keeps us free is that even the most reviled defendant is entitled to have someone stand at his side. (N.B. This venerable maxim seems now to be subject to being cashiered if “the most reviled” turns out to be a January 6 defendant or anyone else even vaguely associated with Donald Trump). The civil libertarian side of lawyering is summed up in a broader context in the old saying (probably incorrectly) attributed to Voltaire, “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

It’s a mark of how old fashioned I’ve become that I have failed to adapt to the new mantra of the legal profession, “I may disapprove of what you say, and if I do, you’re fired.” Hence this story from a few days ago about the (previously) reputable firm, Hogan, Lovells. The story is spelled out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

After the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June, global law firm Hogan Lovells organized an online conference call for female employees. As a retired equity partner still actively serving clients, I was invited to participate in what was billed as a “safe space” for women at the firm to discuss the decision. It might have been a safe space for some, but it wasn’t safe for me.

Everyone else who spoke on the call was unanimous in her anger and outrage about Dobbs. I spoke up to offer a different view. I noted that many jurists and commentators believed Roe had been wrongly decided. I said that the court was right to remand the issue to the states. I added that I thought abortion-rights advocates had brought much of the pushback against Roe on themselves by pushing for extreme policies. I referred to numerous reports of disproportionately high rates of abortion in the black community, which some have called a form of genocide. I said I thought this was tragic.

The outrage was immediate. The next speaker called me a racist and demanded that I leave the meeting. Other participants said they “lost their ability to breathe” on hearing my comments. After more of the same, I hung up.

Someone made a formal complaint to the firm. Later that day, Hogan Lovells suspended my contracts, cut off my contact with clients, removed me from email and document systems, and emailed all U.S. personnel saying that a forum participant had made “anti-Black comments” and was suspended pending an investigation….

Three weeks later I received a letter stating that the firm had concluded that my reference to comments labeling black abortion rates genocide was a violation of the antiharassment policy. Never mind that this view has been expressed by numerous mainstream commentators, black and white, including in these pages. My complaint was dismissed, my contracts with the firm were terminated, and other firms, wary of the publicity, blackballed me—all after an unblemished 44-year career.

Where to start? First, when I retain and pay a law firm, it’s not for the purpose of its using work time to have a “safe space” for its marvelously well-paid attorneys to moan to each other about how much they detest a Supreme Court case that has nothing to do with the work I (and 99% or their other clients) hired them to do. The juvenile self-indulgence of it all is precious.

Second, even if convening a debate about a SCOTUS case might be an acceptable use of firm time, this confab was no such thing. It wasn’t a debate anymore than it was a “safe space.” It was a virtue-signalling contest, premised on the highly dubious notion that approval of at-will abortion, or something like it, is a virtue.

Third, as the author points out, it was anything but a “safe space.” It was safe only if you were on board with the Received Wisdom that Roe is constitutional Holy Writ. But if you wanted seriously to discuss that point by, for example, examining the majority and dissenting opinions, you needed to find a different “safe space” — like, say, the sidewalk.

Fourth, the extent to which the snarl, “racist” has become as ubiquitous as it is dopey is wonderfully illustrated here. The author’s having pointed out that more frequent abortions will disproportionately terminate potential black life may have been many things, but “racist” was not one of them. On the generous assumption that race must be dragged into the abortion debate, as it’s now dragged into everything, pointing out the disproportionately negative impact abortion has on black lives hardly disparages them and, to the contrary, suggests the author’s adherence to the view that — how shall I say this? — black lives matter.

Have I heard that somewhere before?

Finally and most obviously, how are we to view this episode against the idea that the right thing — indeed the essential thing — for the legal profession to do is to defend the reviled, and stand up for even the most appalling people, opinions and behavior?

To be honest, I was never the biggest fan of old-style, breast-beating civil libertarians, because I suspected that they were more sympathetic than they wanted to let on to the indigestible causes they spoke up for, and were not just for “defending to the death” the right of various crackpot groups to campaign for them. But for all my suspicion, I understood, and in the end I had to embrace, the value to freedom, and in particular to freedom of expression, of what they were doing. That freedom, of course, is exactly what the totalitarianism known as Wokeness aims to exterminate.

Or at least to exterminate selectively. I’ve no doubt that the lovely ladies at Hogan, Lovells who couldn’t breathe when confronted with a dissenting opinion on abortion will be inhaling the mountain air when they next take on their pro bono work for some mass murdering Jihadist. “Defending the most despised among us,” dontcha know.